On Dreaming and Becoming
by Emma Weasley Granger
Summary: Casey Novak always knew what she wanted her life to look like. These are the moments that got her there.


**Author's Note:** This is a series of one shots about Casey's life, expanding on the few tiny details we know about her and how she got to where she is today (or, at least, where she was in Season 14 when we last saw her). It will never contradict canon but will fill in details the show never gave.

Later in her life, Casey Novak would wish she could say she became a lawyer because she wanted to help people, or do the right thing, or something. But she didn't. The moment that set the course of her life occurred when she was six years old, laying on the couch with her head in her father's lap as he watched some TV show she was too young to understand.

"What's Harvid?" the girl asked, repeating the foreign word she had heard come from the screen.

"Harvard. It's a school," her father responded absentmindedly. "It's the best school in the whole world."

"The best school?"

"Yeah."

"Can I go there?"

Her dad chuckled a little and looked down at the small girl, her sleepy eyes pointed at the screen.

"It's a school for grownups. After they finish high school."

"You still have to go to school after you finish high school?" Casey finally turned her head up to her father, meeting his eyes. He smiled at her, his inquisitive youngest child, and reached a hand over to stroke her hair.

"You don't have to. Only people who are really smart keep going to school after high school. And the smartest ones go to Harvard."

A grin broke across Casey's face.

"I'm going to go to Harvard."

For as long as she could remember, Casey had needed to be the best at everything. Luckily, this rarely proved especially difficult for her. Casey was shockingly smart, especially for teachers who assumed the third Novak child would be just like her two older brothers, Oliver and Billy. She was athletic, and her competitive spirit was always on full display when she played sports in the school yard. She was a cute kid, too, in the classic sense: flaming red hair, big green eyes, and a huge smile. Even in grade school, Casey was an overachiever.

She was, she knew, the black sheep of the Novak family—or rather, the red sheep. Her older brothers and her parents all had brown hair and hazel eyes, but Casey's red hair was accented by her bright green eyes.

Once, in the second grade, Casey drew her family for a project. The boy who sat next to her watched as used the brown marker to color the hair of all of her family members. Then, she pulled out the orange marker and colored her own.

"Why do you have red hair and no one else does?" The boy asked her. Something about the question was insulting, though she didn't really know why.

"I don't know. I guess that's just how God made me," she replied, her eyes still down at her paper.

"Probably you're adopted."

Casey's head shot up. She looked at the boy, suddenly angry and hurt.

"No I'm not." But Casey nonetheless took the paper and slid it in the slot under her desk, hiding it from view, and stood up to ask the teacher if she could go to the bathroom. She didn't want to be around that boy anymore.

She thought about mentioning it to her big brothers on the school bus, but she couldn't quite work up the courage, so she kept her mouth shut. That is, until the three kids arrived home and greeted their mother in the kitchen. At that point, she couldn't wait any longer.

"Am I adopted?"

"What? Why would you ask that?" Marcy Novak was caught off guard, to say the least.

"Well, Joseph from my class said that since I have red hair and you and Daddy-"

"No, pumpkin girl. You're not adopted. You came out of mommy's tummy just like Olly and Billy did."

Casey smiled with relief. She didn't quite know why the thought of being adopted had scared her so much. She was too young to figure out that it probably spoke to her strange sense of being an outsider in her family, the misfit, even at seven.

Her mother smiled back, thinking that really, Casey was _very much_ not adopted. A third child had not really been in Marcy and Frank's plans, thinking that stopping at two would make the most sense for them, financially. But Marcy and Frank had smiled, and joked that "man plans and God laughs," and in the end, both were so grateful to have the baby girl they had both secretly still wanted.

It was not just her hair that left Casey feeling like the odd one out. Throughout their schooling, her brothers complained constantly about homework and never seemed be able to do well on tests. But Casey couldn't seem to do badly, and she never found the work particularly hard either. In retrospect, she would realize it probably drove her brothers crazy to have a little sister bringing home perfect marks every week, but at the time, her obsession with being the best wrestled with a desire to be just like her big brothers.

Marcy and Frank were overwhelmingly proud of their little firecracker, their little genius, if a bit bemused at how they had created such a little academic. Neither of them had gone to college, or even considered it. Frank was an army man, who wasn't home with his kids as much as he wished he could be. Marcy, a classic housewife, was home perhaps a bit too much.

As years went by, it became clear that Casey's Harvard dreams were not just the ramblings of a sleepy six-year-old. Harvard became a sort of central point in her life, a poster to stare at on her bedroom wall when she did her homework. Something to work towards. Something to dream towards. Casey was going to be the best.

Casey loved words. She loved winning. Casey loved learning and studying and working as hard as she could towards something. So as more and more years went by, the dream progressed a step further than just going to Harvard.

Casey was going to go to Harvard Law School.


End file.
